1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to collected or acquired data, related to at least one Web application programming interface (API) in a Web API ecosystem. The invention further pertains to use of the acquired data to gain important knowledge and insights, for the benefit of API users. At least some of the acquired data is contained in or otherwise related to an API data graph or other data structure. Embodiments of the invention disclosed herein expressly pertain to APIs that are known as Web APIs, as such term is defined hereinafter.
2. Description of the Related Art
Businesses are increasingly exposing their functionalities through APIs. For example, in excess of 10,000 APIs are currently available through a website known as Programmable Web. Moreover, the type of API known as Web API is emerging as a dominant technology for accessing and integrating applications. As a result, there is a movement away from the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) form of application integration, which generally needs high upfront technology investments. API ecosystems are emerging to address API promotion and identification, trust, Terms of Service (ToS), Quality of Service (QoS), composability and the like.
The increased interest in APIs, and specifically Web APIs as described above, has encountered a number of challenges. Existing approaches for capturing Web API domain knowledge, as well as consumption models, are only semi-automated and static. These approaches generally crawl existing data at particular points in time, and thus do not acquire pertinent data on a continuing basis. Also, such approaches tend to have predefined schemas to support query related activities. Moreover, the focus of prior art approaches has generally been only on matchmaking and recommending Web APIs for consumers, but not on analyses that also consider Web API providers and Web API ecosystem providers.